The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to grouping emails for display as a single email item, and, more specifically, but not exclusively, to grouping emails sent by a content provider.
Electronic mail is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Typically, email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Email servers accept, forward, deliver and store electronic mail messages.
Gmail™ and Microsoft OUTLOOK™ are exemplary messaging applications that enable users to exchange electronic mail messages through networked computers.
Electronic mail messages (also denoted herein “email” and “email message”) are often sent to and received by a group of recipients. Typically, during an email correspondence amongst a group of recipients, one or more of the recipients responds to or forwards received emails using reply, reply all, and forward commands. This exchange of emails may become a conversation. As a result, the number of emails appearing in the recipient incoming mail box (e.g. Inbox) and can range up to tens of emails for a single conversation.
In addition, certain service and content providers send the recipient quantities of email messages providing updates, notifications, status, promotions, etc. Examples include FaceBook™ which sends its subscribers daily (or more frequent) notifications of activities occurring in their account, FoxNews™ which sends its subscribers emails regarding breaking news several times a day, or the local telephone company which sends its customers bills or other notifications.
The above two forms of communications, namely email conversations and frequent updates/notifications, may over-populate the recipient's incoming mail box (e.g. Inbox) and make it very hard to manage. Inbox over-population is particularly problematic in mobile device email applications due to the small size of the screen, making the management task very hard on the recipient.
Some solutions address Inbox overpopulation by grouping the emails by conversation. That is the recipient's mail program attempts to group together the emails that seem to belong to the same conversation. This reduces the size of the Inbox due to the conversation grouping.
It should be noted that some email clients allow alternative types of sorting/grouping. For example MS Outlook™ offers sorting by sender. This is usually an impractical way to manage the Inbox since it contradicts sorting by date (which is typically the most important sorting criterion for an Inbox).
It should be also noted that some email clients create a folder that contains all incoming emails that are identified as promotions. This does not resolve the update/notification problem since these are normally too important to the recipient, who wants to see them on the main Inbox and not to have them placed in a “secondary” folder.
Other solutions allow users to define rules which group all emails arriving from specific sender and put them in a separate folder. However this prevents the recipient from seeing them in the Inbox.
Various solutions have been developed to manage email correspondences. For example one solution is a process for composing and displaying a consolidated message document.
The overload of email has driven some email providers (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) to carry out more radical steps. In some cases they “filter” email messages arriving to their users from certain sources. For example, they might filter email messages sent by certain commercial providers. The filtered email messages might be promotions which are of no interest to the user. However, the emails messages may, for example, be an interaction between the commercial provider and its users (e.g. answers to questions etc.), in which case the filtering disrupts the desired communication with the commercial provider.
Email filtering may be done by moving the corresponding email messages to the SPAM folder, by blocking them altogether or by some other means. This causes a problem to both the commercial provider and its users who want to communicate with each other and their email messages get blocked. This problem is denoted herein the “blocking problem”.